How To Rank Individual Pages Locally?

[CyberAlien]

Hello,

A fellow business owner recommend that I signup for Moz to ask questions about local SEO.  I just have a few questions, but please excuse my ignorance since SEO isn't something I'm very familiar with.

My company has locations in 3 different cities in the state of Arkansas.  I've noticed that when I type in certain keywords on Google such as "web design", I see a lot of organic listings from web design companies in my local area - but if I were to search from another city, different listings show up that are related to that city.

I have 3 different pages on my company's website for each of our locations that gives a little bit of information about them - such as the general manager, storefront photos, and the employee of the month.

What can I do to get each of the pages to rank higher on Google in their respective cities?

I've heard a lot of different things mentioned such as having the name, address, and phone number listed.  Including Google Maps on the page with our location.  And some other stuff such as including stuff such as a "KML file" and a "schema markup".

If anyone can give me a list of definitive suggestions, it would be greatly appreciated.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi CyberAlien,

So nice to know a colleague recommended you try Moz, and please don't call yourself ignorant - we are all here to learn and help one another!

Let me share some important info with you regarding Local Search.

If the category your business is in is, in fact, 'web design', then you are in somewhat special circumstances. About four or so years ago, Google stopped showing web design/SEO firms in their local pack of results for core searches like 'web design', 'website design', etc. The local pack of results consists of the lettered results (typically A-G) with the little pin icons that are shown within the other, traditional organic results.

Why did Google stop showing web design/SEO companies in the local packs? To my knowledge, they've never made an official announcement about this, but it's presumed that they did so because Google feels that most of these companies conduct most of their business virtually instead of face-to-face. Conducting in-person, face-to-face business with customers is really the defining characteristic of a local business, in Google's opinion, and so, even though some web design firms do meet with their clients in person, they are out of luck as far as the local packs go.

It is sometimes possible to generate local pack results by adding 'in' to a query, as in 'web design in little rock', but the value of appearing for 'in' queries is generally far less than appearing for main queries like 'web design', 'web design little rock', 'web design company', etc.

So, what this all boils down to is that because Google doesn't really consider your company as local, it's likely that you are going to have to make efforts to appear in the organic results rather than the local ones.

It sounds like you've already taken a big step toward this by creating three pages for each of your three offices. Good start! Some questions:

• Is the content on each of these pages 100% unique?

• Are the offices real, physical offices occupied solely by your firm? If so, yes, you could utilize schema. This article offers tools for doing so: http://moz.com/blog/free-local-seo-tools

• Have you optimized these page for both the service terms AND the geographic terms?

• Have you made the content on these pages really exciting and helpful? Are the pages short or long?

• Have you promoted these pages socially in any way?

• Do you have customer testimonials on these pages? If so, are you using some form of schema review markup?

• Are there good links pointing to these pages, both from inside the site and from outside the site?

These are few questions to start with. I'm sure the community will have more questions and advice.